We develop a theory of high-arity PAC learning, which is statistical learning in the presence of "structured correlation". In this theory, hypotheses are either graphs, hypergraphs or, more generally, structures in finite relational languages, and i.i.d. sampling is replaced by sampling an induced substructure, producing an exchangeable distribution. We prove a high-arity version of the fundamental theorem of statistical learning by characterizing high-arity (agnostic) PAC learnability in terms of finiteness of a purely combinatorial dimension and in terms of an appropriate version of uniform convergence.

Machine learning models trained with differentially-private (DP) algorithms such as DP-SGD enjoy resilience against a wide range of privacy attacks. Although it is possible to derive bounds for some attacks based solely on an $(\varepsilon,\delta)$-DP guarantee, meaningful bounds require a small enough privacy budget (i.e., injecting a large amount of noise), which results in a large loss in utility. This paper presents a new approach to evaluate the privacy of machine learning models against specific record-level threats, such as membership and attribute inference, without the indirection through DP. We focus on the popular DP-SGD algorithm, and derive simple closed-form bounds. Our proofs model DP-SGD as an information theoretic channel whose inputs are the secrets that an attacker wants to infer (e.g., membership of a data record) and whose outputs are the intermediate model parameters produced by iterative optimization. We obtain bounds for membership inference that match state-of-the-art techniques, whilst being orders of magnitude faster to compute. Additionally, we present a novel data-dependent bound against attribute inference. Our results provide a direct, interpretable, and practical way to evaluate the privacy of trained models against specific inference threats without sacrificing utility.

Mathematical and computational tools have proven to be reliable in decision-making processes. In recent times, in particular, machine learning-based methods are becoming increasingly popular as advanced support tools. When dealing with control problems, reinforcement learning has been applied to decision-making in several applications, most notably in games. The success of these methods in finding solutions to complex problems motivates the exploration of new areas where they can be employed to overcome current difficulties. In this paper, we explore the use of automatic control strategies to initial boundary value problems in thermal and disease transport. Specifically, in this work, we adapt an existing reinforcement learning algorithm using a stochastic policy gradient method and we introduce two novel reward functions to drive the flow of the transported field. The new model-based framework exploits the interactions between a reaction-diffusion model and the modified agent. The results show that certain controls can be implemented successfully in these applications, although model simplifications had to be assumed.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at the Winograd Schema Challenge (WSC), a coreference resolution task testing common-sense reasoning through pronoun disambiguation, they struggle with instances that feature minor alterations or rewording. To address this, we introduce EvoGrad, an open-source platform that harnesses a human-in-the-loop approach to create a dynamic dataset tailored to such altered WSC instances. Leveraging ChatGPT's capabilities, we expand our task instances from 182 to 3,691, setting a new benchmark for diverse common-sense reasoning datasets. Additionally, we introduce the error depth metric, assessing model stability in dynamic tasks. Our results emphasize the challenge posed by EvoGrad: Even the best performing LLM, GPT-3.5, achieves an accuracy of 65.0% with an average error depth of 7.2, a stark contrast to human performance of 92. 8% accuracy without perturbation errors. This highlights ongoing model limitations and the value of dynamic datasets in uncovering them.

Large language models (LLMs) have become the secret ingredient driving numerous industrial applications, showcasing their remarkable versatility across a diverse spectrum of tasks. From natural language processing and sentiment analysis to content generation and personalized recommendations, their unparalleled adaptability has facilitated widespread adoption across industries. This transformative shift driven by LLMs underscores the need to explore the underlying associated challenges and avenues for enhancement in their utilization. In this paper, our objective is to unravel and evaluate the obstacles and opportunities inherent in leveraging LLMs within an industrial context. To this end, we conduct a survey involving a group of industry practitioners, develop four research questions derived from the insights gathered, and examine 68 industry papers to address these questions and derive meaningful conclusions.

This short paper highlights the growing importance of information retrieval (IR) engines in the scientific community, addressing the inefficiency of traditional keyword-based search engines due to the rising volume of publications. The proposed solution involves structured records, underpinning advanced information technology (IT) tools, including visualization dashboards, to revolutionize how researchers access and filter articles, replacing the traditional text-heavy approach. This vision is exemplified through a proof of concept centered on the ``reproductive number estimate of infectious diseases'' research theme, using a fine-tuned large language model (LLM) to automate the creation of structured records to populate a backend database that now goes beyond keywords. The result is a next-generation IR method accessible at https://orkg.org/usecases/r0-estimates.

The success of language models in code assistance has spurred the proposal of repository-level code completion as a means to enhance prediction accuracy, utilizing the context from the entire codebase. However, this amplified context can inadvertently increase inference latency, potentially undermining the developer experience and deterring tool adoption - a challenge we termed the Context-Latency Conundrum. This paper introduces REPOFUSE, a pioneering solution designed to enhance repository-level code completion without the latency trade-off. REPOFUSE uniquely fuses two types of context: the analogy context, rooted in code analogies, and the rationale context, which encompasses in-depth semantic relationships. We propose a novel rank truncated generation (RTG) technique that efficiently condenses these contexts into prompts with restricted size. This enables REPOFUSE to deliver precise code completions while maintaining inference efficiency. Through testing with the CrossCodeEval suite, REPOFUSE has demonstrated a significant leap over existing models, achieving a 40.90% to 59.75% increase in exact match (EM) accuracy for code completions and a 26.8% enhancement in inference speed. Beyond experimental validation, REPOFUSE has been integrated into the workflow of a large enterprise, where it actively supports various coding tasks.

Recent developments in natural language processing (NLP) have highlighted the need for substantial amounts of data for models to capture textual information accurately. This raises concerns regarding the computational resources and time required for training such models. This paper introduces Semantics for data SAliency in Model performance Estimation (SeSaME). It is an efficient data sampling mechanism solely based on textual information without passing the data through a compute-heavy model or other intensive pre-processing transformations. The application of this approach is demonstrated in the use case of low-resource automated speech recognition (ASR) models, which excessively rely on text-to-speech (TTS) calls when using augmented data. SeSaME learns to categorize new incoming data points into speech recognition difficulty buckets by employing semantic similarity-based graph structures and discrete ASR information from homophilous neighbourhoods through message passing. The results indicate reliable projections of ASR performance, with a 93% accuracy increase when using the proposed method compared to random predictions, bringing non-trivial information on the impact of textual representations in speech models. Furthermore, a series of experiments show both the benefits and challenges of using the ASR information on incoming data to fine-tune the model. We report a 7% drop in validation loss compared to random sampling, 7% WER drop with non-local aggregation when evaluating against a highly difficult dataset, and 1.8% WER drop with local aggregation and high semantic similarity between datasets.

Contemporary models for generating images show remarkable quality and versatility. Swayed by these advantages, the research community repurposes them to generate videos. Since video content is highly redundant, we argue that naively bringing advances of image models to the video generation domain reduces motion fidelity, visual quality and impairs scalability. In this work, we build Snap Video, a video-first model that systematically addresses these challenges. To do that, we first extend the EDM framework to take into account spatially and temporally redundant pixels and naturally support video generation. Second, we show that a U-Net - a workhorse behind image generation - scales poorly when generating videos, requiring significant computational overhead. Hence, we propose a new transformer-based architecture that trains 3.31 times faster than U-Nets (and is ~4.5 faster at inference). This allows us to efficiently train a text-to-video model with billions of parameters for the first time, reach state-of-the-art results on a number of benchmarks, and generate videos with substantially higher quality, temporal consistency, and motion complexity. The user studies showed that our model was favored by a large margin over the most recent methods. See our website at https://snap-research.github.io/snapvideo/.

The summarization capabilities of pretrained and large language models (LLMs) have been widely validated in general areas, but their use in scientific corpus, which involves complex sentences and specialized knowledge, has been less assessed. This paper presents conceptual and experimental analyses of scientific summarization, highlighting the inadequacies of traditional evaluation methods, such as $n$-gram, embedding comparison, and QA, particularly in providing explanations, grasping scientific concepts, or identifying key content. Subsequently, we introduce the Facet-aware Metric (FM), employing LLMs for advanced semantic matching to evaluate summaries based on different aspects. This facet-aware approach offers a thorough evaluation of abstracts by decomposing the evaluation task into simpler subtasks.Recognizing the absence of an evaluation benchmark in this domain, we curate a Facet-based scientific summarization Dataset (FD) with facet-level annotations. Our findings confirm that FM offers a more logical approach to evaluating scientific summaries. In addition, fine-tuned smaller models can compete with LLMs in scientific contexts, while LLMs have limitations in learning from in-context information in scientific domains. This suggests an area for future enhancement of LLMs.